Thursday, August 27, 2009

Normally, when I read an xkcd comic, the flaw or gap in the humor is apparent on the first read, with possible nitpicks spotted the second or third time. Only takes a couple minutes max to get around a joke (or a stat concept, ha).

But this one...it works for me. The first two panels had me worried, with Randall loading up his double barrels of meme humor "conventions" and "furries," but the third panel, expository as it was, made me chuckle. The joke is way better than that time he stood up for furries -- here, we have a non-moralizing joke!

The fourth panel is a little dry, but it gets his point across and is more effective than if the comic stuck with the packing scene. The flavor text (which was also on point) kind of begs for an SMBC-style bonus panel of two furry-humanies debating which kind of sex is better, perhaps as a staged event, with the crowd dressed according to its division, but that'd be more art than Randy's churned out in a while. All in all, this comic bucks the trend of making me wish it would go an extra mile and instead makes me thankful that it didn't forget a joke. Lowered expectations, or a minor success? I'm willing to believe. *releases a dove into the clear blue sky*

And I'm pleased that my guest week gets to end with an alright comic. I don't know how Carl deals with the bingo chart of hate-filled responses, but for my part, I enjoy the cameraderie of belittling someone else's efforts...when they're bad. And when there's cameraderie. If this blog was just blind nerd-rage without laughter, then I'd have moved on as soon as I arrived. If xkcd remained an alright comic with its own readers and no hypetarians trying to convert me to love it because SCIENCE LOL, I wouldn't have thought to hate it.

Instead, xkcd's litany of non-jokes is a tie and a book and a spreading guide to tech support, and the feedback here splits between "not a bad post" and "don't ever post here again," and that works. The old crew is aware that this fish tank-sized community only exists so long as spite towards xkcd exists, and the new arrivals seem to catch on to our fun-loving ways soon after their obligatory winded speeches about how we could be leading actual, rewarding lives. Somewhere along the way, hunting cuddlefish went out of vogue, and I don't know why (Amanda? Rob?).

So, while this post was written with the skin of someone who likes xkcd (this time!), I'm ready to don the hater skin come Monday. But we all know what's underneath.

Posted by
thomas

79 comments:

I did not care for this comic. It presented an idea--not too humorous, not too believable, but an idea--and that was about it. It strikes me as the work of a man in need of a strip to make his deadline. "Furries=funny! What can I say about furries?" In terms of execution, the third panel was too wordy. Shorter, punchier dialog for this (the main point of the strip) would have improved the clarity and the buildup to the final panel.

Agreed. I think there's a limit to how much editing can do for this comic--it seems VERY idiosyncratic. But Christ, Randy, at least get SOME. How many times will we have to suffer the trauma of watching a potentially clever idea be delivered DOA?

Oh I just noticed, Randy did his trademark move of putting a reaction phrase (I see, or Yes, yes it is) and another panel after the punchline. Seriously Randall, a joke is not a story arch, you do not need to have falling actions after the climax, you just need to find a PUNCHline and end there. No reaction shot from the other character (which are all basically stand in phrases for "Oh Randy your ideas are so clever and unique") and no useless panel after the joke.

This seems like another "illustrated picto-blog" comic. "My fursona is a human" is the sort of thing you'd randomly post on Twitter out of boredom. Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I like Randall's Illustrated Picto-Blog. He has some really neat ideas sometimes. I wish he would just recognize that he's better at drawing visualizations of nerdy daydreams than he is at being funny, and switch gears a bit.

Kirk, there's humour in that fourth panel - certainly enough to justify its existence. If it had ended on the third panel, it would have felt more like an idea that was delivered without doing anything with it.

Kirk, there's humour in that fourth panel - certainly enough to justify its existence. If it had ended on the third panel, it would have felt more like an idea that was delivered without doing anything with it.

It ALREADY feels like that, because the delivery on the idea was so tepid.

Thomas in his comments hit the nail on the head here. This was an... okay comic. And an important part of this website/community/hatedom to me is that it does more than juste hate XKCD. It makes fun of it when it sucks, indeed, but it also points the way to a better comic, or if you will, "Illustrated Picto-Blog". And, paradoxically enough, I think it helps me appreciate XKCD more. Before coming here, I viewed the comic as mannah from heaven, universally funny and intelligent. But now, though I see much less humor in the comic, I see the human side of XKCD: the story of a truly interesting fellow who sometimes hits and sometimes misses. This site is dedicated to the misses, but we can't ignore the hits.

I agree that, while it was pretty good up to the third panel, the last one just didn't get it over the line. Still, I prefer it over a lot of other recent ones. i.e., I only smiled but at least I didn't feel like smacking him.

Kirk: I don't see how that's true in this case. Where do you think it should have ended? |

I'm pretty sure the best way to end the comic is to replace the dialog of the fourth panel with something along the lines of the alt text. (I guess character one can complain about how hot it is under two different suits, while the other one questions why you need to wear a suit at all) This way, you keep the joke from the alt text of "are you supposed to wear multiple suits?" with the added bonus of the joke "due to my art style, how could you tell!"

I read today's strip, and I had to reread it about twice in order to properly realise that THAT was the "joke". There's no joke at all: just a vaguely, potentially intriguing idea thrown on the ground with a very, very tepid and inneffective fleshing out. Maybe it's good that there WAS fleshing out this time around, unlike other strips in which there was JUST an idea thrown around. But the idea wasn't even that good to support a simple, immediate joke. I saw no humour whatsoever in the strip today; it was so dry, bland and pointless, it left me quite frustrated, in fact.

This was a crappy comic. Not "I'm going to punch randy in the face if I ever see him" crappy, just not original or funny crappy.The premise on its own is kind of funny if you think about it, but can you make a good joke out of it?On the forums, there were only about 3 or 4 people that offered to suck randy's dick. But overall, it didn't generate much of a response.That's how you KNOW it's bad.I did find this though, which I thought was funny:"Observation #3: Randall is a furry, but doesn't want to admit it. Plans on admitting it after he makes enough furry comics to soften the blow to his reputation. Also Black hat guy will wear cat ears sometime in the future."

Why William you miss my point! Ignatius Reilly is a modern saint, he is the genius, much like yourself, who is surrounded by a confederacy of dunces (The Confederate States of Xkcdsucks, in your case).

You should not see my comparison as an insult, but as a great complement, for you see, though these dunces (and his constantly drunken mom) kept him from achieving his greater potential, and it is their fault that he is forced to stay with his mother.

I have enjoyed the writing of Huge Willy for as long as I have been reading xkcdsucks. I didn't know about the twitter before- I'm definitely going to check up on that every so often.I would also like to note that the forum thread has ascended (yes) into a discussion on the history and origins of furries.

Also, is the dialog "I've been driving a car and having a job all day" just because the animals aren't very good at pretending to be human, or because randy doesn't actually know how people converse? The world may never know!

Justin: I also had questions about the dialogue in the last panel. At first I assumed it was because it was meant to be humans pretending to be animals pretending to be human, but then...why ask if they meowed? I am forced to conclude that Randy has never had any interaction with anyone, ever.

@founder of the American navy (thanks, whoever taught me that last time): presumably their fursonas (and I was hoping to go through life without ever using that word!) are bragging about how good they are at imitating humans. They are, as you say, humans imitating (animals imitating humans). So person on the left is pretending to be a cat pretending to be human and proud of how good she is at pretending to be human, so good she didn't let the facade slip and meow at all.

Persons A and B are conversing. The character person A plays, which is a cat pretending to be a human, asks the character person B plays, which is a cat pretending to be a human, if the character that person B plays meowed. This makes sense since in character, person B is in fact a cat

I wasn't digging this comic at all until I got to the last panel, the lines "did you meow?" and "not once!" actually had me laugh out loud. I was all set up to hate this comic for the first three panels but it ended up being the first xkcd I've laughed at in what seems like years.

But 209 did it far, far better. First, it makes much more sense. I can't really imagine anyone prefacing every sentence like that (and there has got to be a better line to use than "Are there any bagels left?"). Second, he did what all good comic writers do: he put an extra joke in after the punchline ("it goes over water, too!").

Admittedly, the alt-text slightly redeems the actual comic. It's an actual joke (a rare strain of alt-text), and it's a direct extension of the comic, not some weird little vignette or half-'tarded math lesson.

Good thing to put after a joke: A second joke which builds on the first joke's momentum.

Bad thing to put after a joke: Semantically void character commentary, whose sole purpose is to clue the reader in on the fact that YES, the webcomic just told a joke, incidentally killing all the momentum and impact of the punchline and leaving the end of the comic, not two jokes told in quick succession, but a deflated, self-effacing blandness.

I, like undoubtedly so many others, discovered this blog when I got really tired of xkcd making stale, unfunny jokes, and Googled 'xkcd sucks'. So, obviously, everyone here is going to think likewise.

Although the current Anon is acting like (and might be) a troll, criticism is fairly frequent here and it's either made fun of or shot down almost immediately. Even criticism that doesn't quite fit on the bingo chart regularly pops up. So, dealing with that more respectively, when applicable, would be admittedly pretty nice to see.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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